CHAPTER XXVI. IMPERIAL ATHENS UNDER PERICLES
Athens the stately-walled, magnificent!—Pindar.
[460-430 B.C.]
The judicial alterations effected at Athens by Pericles and Ephialtes, described in a preceding chapter, gave to a large proportion of the citizens direct jury functions and an active interest in the constitution, such as they had never before enjoyed; the change being at once a mark of previous growth of democratical sentiment during the past, and a cause of its further development during the future. The Athenian people were at this time ready for any personal exertion. The naval service especially was prosecuted with a degree of assiduity which brought about continual improvement in skill and efficiency; while the poorer citizens, of whom it chiefly consisted, were more exact in obedience and discipline than any of the more opulent persons from whom the infantry or the cavalry were drawn. The maritime multitude, in addition to self-confidence and courage, acquired by this laborious training an increased skill, which placed the Athenian navy every year more and more above the rest of Greece: and the perfection of this force became the more indispensable as the Athenian empire was now again confined to the sea and seaport towns; the reverses immediately preceding the Thirty Years’ Truce having broken up all Athenian land ascendency over Megara, Bœotia, and the other continental territories adjoining to Attica.
RESTORATION OF THE PARTHENON
Instead of trying to cherish or restore the feelings of equal alliance, Pericles formally disclaimed it. He maintained that Athens owed to her subject allies no account of the money received from them, so long as she performed her contract by keeping away the Persian enemy, and maintaining the safety of the Ægean waters. This was, as he represented, the obligation which Athens had undertaken; and provided it were faithfully discharged, the allies had no right to ask questions or institute control. That it was faithfully discharged no one could deny: no ship of war except those of Athens and her allies was ever seen between the eastern and western shores of the Ægean. An Athenian fleet of sixty triremes was kept on duty in these waters, chiefly manned by Athenian citizens, and beneficial as well from the protection afforded to commerce as for keeping the seamen in constant pay and training. And such was the effective superintendence maintained, that in the disastrous period preceding the Thirty Years’ Truce, when Athens lost Megara and Bœotia, and with difficulty recovered Eubœa, none of her numerous maritime subjects took the opportunity to revolt.
The total of these distinct tributary cities is said to have amounted to one thousand, according to a verse of Aristophanes, which cannot be under the truth, though it may well be, and probably is, greatly above the truth. The total annual tribute collected at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, and probably also for the years preceding it, is given by Thucydides at about six hundred talents [£120,000 or $600,000]. Of the sums paid by particular states, however, we have little or no information. It was placed under the superintendence of the Hellenotamiæ; originally officers of the confederacy, but now removed from Delos to Athens, and acting altogether as an Athenian treasury-board. The sum total of the Athenian revenue, from all sources, including this tribute, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War is stated by Xenophon at one thousand talents: customs, harbour, and market-dues, receipt from the silver mines at Laurium, rents of public property, fines from judicial sentences, a tax per head upon slaves, the annual payment made by each metic, etc., may have made up a larger sum than four hundred talents; which sum, added to the six hundred talents from tribute, would make the total named by Xenophon. But a verse of Aristophanes, during the ninth year of the Peloponnesian War, B.C. 422, gives the general total of that time as “nearly two thousand talents”: this is in all probability much above the truth, though we may reasonably imagine that the amount of tribute money levied upon the allies had been augmented during the interval. Whatever may have been the actual magnitude of the Athenian budget, however, prior to the Peloponnesian War, we know that during the larger part of the administration of Pericles, the revenue including tribute, was so managed as to leave a large annual surplus; insomuch that a treasure of coined money was accumulated in the Acropolis during the years preceding the Peloponnesian War—which treasure when at its maximum reached the great sum of ninety-seven hundred talents [£1,940,000 or $9,700,000], and was still at six thousand talents, after a serious drain for various purposes, at the moment when that war began. This system of public economy, constantly laying by a considerable sum year after year—in which Athens stood alone, since none of the Peloponnesian states had any public reserve whatever—goes far of itself to vindicate Pericles from the charge of having wasted the public money in mischievous distributions for the purpose of obtaining popularity; and also to exonerate the Athenian demos from that reproach of a greedy appetite for living by the public purse which it is common to advance against them. After the death of Cimon, no further expeditions were undertaken against the Persians, and even for some years before his death, not much appears to have been done. The tribute money thus remained unexpended, and kept in reserve, as the presidential duties of Athens prescribed, against future attack, which might at any time be renewed.
Though we do not know the exact amount of the other sources of Athenian revenue, however, we know that tribute received from allies was the largest item in it. And altogether the exercise of empire abroad became a prominent feature in Athenian life, and a necessity to Athenian sentiment, not less than democracy at home. Athens was no longer, as she had been once, a single city, with Attica for her territory: she was a capital or imperial city—a despot-city, was the expression used by her enemies, and even sometimes by her own citizens—with many dependencies attached to her, and bound to follow her orders. Such was the manner in which not merely Pericles and the other leading statesmen, but even the humblest Athenian citizen, conceived the dignity of Athens; and the sentiment was one which carried with it both personal pride and stimulus to patriotism.
To establish Athenian interests in the dependent territories, was one important object in the eyes of Pericles, and while he discountenanced all distant and rash enterprises, such as invasion of Egypt or Cyprus, he planted out many cleruchies and colonies of Athenian citizens intermingled with allies, on islands and parts of the coast. He conducted one thousand citizens to the Thracian Chersonese, five hundred to Naxos, and two hundred and fifty to Andros. In the Chersonese, he further repelled the barbarous Thracian invaders from without, and even undertook the labour of carrying a wall of defence across the isthmus, which connected the peninsula with Thrace; since the barbarous Thracian tribes, though expelled some time before by Cimon, had still continued to renew their incursions from time to time. Ever since the occupation of the elder Miltiades, about eighty years before, there had been in this peninsula many Athenian proprietors, apparently intermingled with half-civilised Thracians: the settlers now acquired both greater numerical strength and better protection, though it does not appear that the cross-wall was permanently maintained. The maritime expeditions of Pericles even extended into the Euxine Sea, as far as the important Greek city of Sinope, then governed by a despot named Timesileus, against whom a large proportion of the citizens were in active discontent.
Lamachus was left with thirteen Athenian triremes to assist in expelling the despot, who was driven into exile with his friends: the properties of these exiles were confiscated, and assigned to the maintenance of six hundred Athenian citizens, admitted to equal fellowship and residence with the Sinopians. We may presume that on this occasion Sinope became a member of the Athenian tributary alliance, if it had not been so before: but we do not know whether Cotyora and Trapezus, dependencies of Sinope further eastward, which the ten thousand Greeks found on their retreat fifty years afterwards, existed in the time of Pericles or not. Moreover, the numerous and well-equipped Athenian fleet, under the command of Pericles, produced an imposing effect upon the barbarous princes and tribes along the coast, contributing certainly to the security of Grecian trade, and probably to the acquisition of new dependent allies.
It was by successive proceedings of this sort that many detachments of Athenian citizens became settled in various portions of the maritime empire of the city—some rich, investing their property in the islands as more secure (from the incontestable superiority of Athens at sea) even than Attica, which since the loss of the Megarid could not be guarded against a Peloponnesian land invasion—others poor, and hiring themselves out as labourers. The islands of Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros, as well as the territory of Histiæa, on the north of Eubœa, were completely occupied by Athenian proprietors and citizens: other places were partially so occupied. And it was doubtless advantageous to the islanders to associate themselves with Athenians in trading enterprises, since they thereby obtained a better chance of the protection of the Athenian fleet. It seems that Athens passed regulations occasionally for the commerce of her dependent allies, as we see by the fact that, shortly before the Peloponnesian War, she excluded the Megarians from all their ports. The commercial relations between Piræus and the Ægean reached their maximum during the interval immediately preceding the Peloponnesian War. Nor were these relations confined to the country east and north of Attica: they reached also the western regions. The most important settlements founded by Athens during this period were, Amphipolis in Thrace and Thurii in Italy. Amphipolis was planted by a colony of Athenians and other Greeks, under the conduct of the Athenian Agnon, in 437 B.C. It was situated near the river Strymon in Thrace, on the eastern bank, and at the spot where the Strymon resumes its river-course after emerging from the lake above.
The colony of Thurii on the coast of the Gulf of Tarentum in Italy, near the site and on the territory of the ancient Sybaris, was founded by Athens about seven years earlier than Amphipolis, not long after the conclusion of the Thirty Years’ Truce with Sparta, 443 B.C.
The fourteen years between the Thirty Years’ Truce and the breaking out of the Peloponnesian War, are a period of full maritime empire on the part of Athens—partially indeed resisted, but never with success. They are a period of peace with all cities extraneous to her own empire; and of splendid decorations to the city itself, emanating from the genius of Phidias and others, in sculpture as well as in architecture. Since the death of Cimon, Pericles had become, gradually but entirely, the first citizen in the commonwealth. His qualities told for more, the longer they were known, and even the disastrous reverses which preceded the Thirty Years’ Truce had not overthrown him, since he had protested against that expedition of Tolmides into Bœotia out of which they first arose. But if the personal influence of Pericles had increased, the party opposed to him seems also to have become stronger than before; and to have acquired a leader in many respects more effective than Cimon—Thucydides, son of Melesias.
The new chief was a relative of Cimon, but of a character and talents more analogous to those of Pericles: a statesman and orator rather than a general, though competent to both functions if occasion demanded, as every leading man in those days was required to be. Under Thucydides, the political and parliamentary opposition against Pericles assumed a constant character and organisation such as Cimon, with his exclusively military aptitudes, had never been able to establish. The aristocratical party in the commonwealth—the “honourable and respectable” citizens, as we find them styled, adopting their own nomenclature—now imposed upon themselves the obligation of undeviating regularity in their attendance on the public assembly, sitting together in a particular section, so as to be conspicuously parted from the demos. In this manner, their applause and dissent, their mutual encouragement to each other, their distribution of parts to different speakers, was made more conducive to the party purposes than it had been before when these distinguished persons were intermingled with the mass of citizens. Thucydides himself was eminent as a speaker, inferior only to Pericles—perhaps hardly inferior even to him.
Such an opposition made to Pericles, in all the full license which a democratical constitution permitted, must have been both efficient and embarrassing. But the pointed severance of the aristocratical chiefs, which Thucydides, son of Melesias, introduced, contributed probably at once to rally the democratical majority round Pericles, and to exasperate the bitterness of party conflict. As far as we can make out the grounds of the opposition, it turned partly upon the pacific policy of Pericles towards the Persians, partly upon his expenditure for home ornament. Thucydides contended that Athens was disgraced in the eyes of the Greeks by having drawn the confederate treasure from Delos to her own Acropolis, under pretence of greater security—and then employing it, not in prosecuting war against the Persians, but in beautifying Athens by new temples and costly statues. To this Pericles replied that Athens had undertaken the obligation, in consideration of the tribute-money, to protect her allies and keep off from them every foreign enemy,—that she had accomplished this object completely at the present, and retained a reserve sufficient to guarantee the like security for the future,—that under such circumstances she owed no account to her allies of the expenditure of the surplus, but was at liberty to employ it for purposes useful and honourable to the city. In this point of view it was an object of great public importance to render Athens imposing in the eyes both of the allies and of Hellas generally, by improved fortifications,—by accumulated embellishment, sculptural and architectural,—and by religious festivals, frequent, splendid, musical, and poetical.
Such was the answer made by Pericles in defence of his policy against the opposition headed by Thucydides. And considering the ground of the debate on both sides, the answer was perfectly satisfactory. For when we look at the very large sum which Pericles continually kept in reserve in the treasury, no one could reasonably complain that his expenditure for ornamental purposes was carried so far as to encroach upon the exigencies of defence. What Thucydides and his partisans appear to have urged, was that this common fund should still continue to be spent in aggressive warfare against the Persian king, in Egypt and elsewhere—conformably to the projects pursued by Cimon during his life. But Pericles was right in contending that such outlay would have been simply wasteful; of no use either to Athens or her allies, though risking all the chances of distant defeat, such as had been experienced a few years before in Egypt.
So bitter however was the opposition made by Thucydides and his party to this projected expenditure—so violent and pointed did the scission of aristocrats and democrats become—that the dispute came after no long time to that ultimate appeal which the Athenian constitution provided for the case of two opposite and nearly equal party-leaders—a vote of ostracism. Of the particular details which preceded this ostracism, we are not informed; but we see clearly that the general position was such as the ostracism was intended to meet. Probably the vote was proposed by the party of Thucydides, in order to procure the banishment of Pericles, the more powerful person of the two and the most likely to excite popular jealousy. The challenge was accepted by Pericles and his friends, and the result of the voting was such that an adequate legal majority condemned Thucydides to ostracism. And it seems that the majority must have been very decisive, for the party of Thucydides was completely broken by it: and we hear of no other single individual equally formidable, as a leader of opposition, throughout all the remaining life of Pericles.
The ostracism of Thucydides apparently took place about two years after the conclusion of the Thirty Years’ Truce (443-442 B.C.), and it is to the period immediately following, that the great Periclean works belong. The southern wall of the Acropolis had been built out of the spoils brought by Cimon from his Persian expeditions; but the third of the Long Walls connecting Athens with the harbour was the proposition of Pericles, at what precise time we do not know. The Long Walls originally completed (not long after the battle of Tanagra, as has already been stated) were two, one from Athens to Piræus, another from Athens to Phalerum: the space between them was broad, and if in the hands of an enemy, the communication with Piræus would be interrupted. Accordingly, Pericles now induced the people to construct a third or intermediate wall, running parallel with the first wall to Piræus, and within a short distance (seemingly near one furlong) from it: so that the communication between the city and the port was placed beyond all possible interruption, even assuming an enemy to have got within the Phaleric wall. It was seemingly about this time, too, that the splendid docks and arsenal in Piræus, alleged by Isocrates to have cost one thousand talents [£200,000 or $1,000,000] were constructed; while the town itself of Piræus was laid out anew with straight streets intersecting at right angles. Apparently this was something new in Greece—the towns generally, and Athens itself in particular, having been built without any symmetry, or width, or continuity of streets: and Hippodamus the Milesian, a man of considerable attainments in the physical philosophy of the age, derived much renown as the earliest town architect, for having laid out the Piræus on a regular plan. The market-place, or one of them at least, permanently bore his name—the Hippodamian agora. At a time when so many great architects were displaying their genius in the construction of temples, we are not surprised to hear that the structure of towns began to be regularised also. Moreover we are told that the new colonial town of Thurii, to which Hippodamus went as a settler, was also constructed in the same systematic form as to straight and wide streets.
The new scheme upon which the Piræus was laid out, was not without its value as one visible proof of the naval grandeur of Athens. But the buildings in Athens and on the Acropolis formed the real glory of the Periclean age. A new theatre, termed the Odeon, was constructed for musical and poetical representations at the great Panathenaic solemnity; next, the splendid temple of Athene, called the Parthenon, with all its masterpieces of decorative sculpture, friezes, and reliefs; lastly, the costly portals erected to adorn the entrance of the Acropolis, on the western side of the hill, through which the solemn processions on festival days were conducted. It appears that the Odeon and the Parthenon were both finished between 445 and 437 B.C.: the Propylæa somewhat later, between 437 and 431 B.C., in which latter year the Peloponnesian War began. Progress was also made in restoring or reconstructing the Erechtheion, or ancient temple of Athene Polias, the patron goddess of the city—which had been burnt in the invasion of Xerxes. But the breaking out of the Peloponnesian War seems to have prevented the completion of this, as well as of the great temple of Demeter, at Eleusis, for the celebration of the Eleusinian mysteries—that of Athene, at Sunium—and that of Nemesis at Rhamnus. Nor was the sculpture less memorable than the architecture; three statues of Athene, all by the hand of Phidias, decorated the Acropolis, one colossal, forty-seven feet high, of ivory, in the Parthenon, a second of bronze, called the Lemnian Athene, a third of colossal magnitude, also in bronze, called Athene Promachos, placed between the Propylæa, and the Parthenon, and visible from afar off, even to the navigator approaching Piræus by sea.
It is not, of course, to Pericles that the renown of these splendid productions of art belongs; but the great sculptors and architects, by whom they were conceived and executed, belonged to that same period of expanding and stimulating Athenian democracy, which likewise called forth creative genius in oratory, in dramatic poetry, and in philosophical speculation.
Considering these prodigious achievements in the field of art only as they bear upon Athenian and Grecian history, they are phenomena of extraordinary importance. When we learn the profound impression which they produced upon Grecian spectators of a later age, we may judge how immense was the effect upon that generation which saw them both begun and finished. In the year 480 B.C., Athens was ruined by the occupation of Xerxes: since that period, the Greeks had seen, first, the rebuilding and fortifying of the city on an enlarged scale; next, the addition of Piræus with its docks and magazines; thirdly, the junction of the two by the Long Walls, thus including the most numerous concentrated population, wealth, arms, ships, etc., in Greece; lastly, the rapid creation of so many new miracles of art—the sculptures of Phidias as well as the paintings of the Thasian painter Polygnotus, in the temple of Theseus, and in the portico called Pœcile.[b]
Plutarch says: “That which was the chief delight of the Athenians and the wonder of strangers, and which alone serves for a proof that the boasted power and opulence of ancient Greece is not an idle tale, was the magnificence of the temples and public edifices. Works were raised of an astonishing magnitude, and inimitable beauty and perfection, every architect striving to surpass the magnificence of the design with the elegance of the execution; yet still the most wonderful circumstance was the expedition with which they were completed. Phidias was appointed by Pericles superintendent of all the public edifices.”
f
It thus appears that the gigantic strides by which Athens had reached her maritime empire were now immediately succeeded by a series of works which stamped her as the imperial city of Greece, gave to her an appearance of power even greater than the reality, and especially put to shame the old-fashioned simplicity of Sparta. The cost was doubtless prodigious, and could only have been borne at a time when there was a large treasure in the Acropolis, as well as a considerable tribute annually coming in: if we may trust a computation which seems to rest on plausible grounds, it cannot have been much less than three thousand talents in the aggregate [£600,000 or $3,000,000].
The expenditure of so large a sum was, of course, a source of revenue and of great private gain to all manner of contractors, tradesmen, merchants, artisans of various descriptions, etc., concerned in it: in one way or another, it distributed itself over a large portion of the whole city. And it appears that the materials employed for much of the work were designedly of the most costly description, as being most consistent with the reverence due to the gods: marble was rejected as too common for the statue of Athene, and ivory employed in its place; while the gold with which it was surrounded weighed not less than forty talents [£8000 or $40,000]. A large expenditure for such purposes, considered as pious towards the gods, was at the same time imposing in reference to Grecian feeling, which regarded with admiration every variety of public show and magnificence, and repaid with grateful deference the rich men who indulged in it. Pericles knew well that the visible splendour of the city, so new to all his contemporaries, would cause her great power to appear greater still, and would thus procure for her a real, though unacknowledged influence—perhaps even an ascendency—over all cities of the Grecian name. And it is certain that even among those who most hated and feared her, at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, there prevailed a powerful sentiment of involuntary deference.
JUDICIAL REFORMS OF PERICLES
Before Ephialtes advanced his main proposition for abridging the competence of the senate of Areopagus, he appears to have been strenuous in repressing the practical abuse of magisterial authority, by accusations brought against the magistrates at the period of their regular accountability. After repeated efforts to check the practical abuse of these magisterial powers, Ephialtes and Pericles were at last conducted to the proposition of cutting them down permanently, and introducing an altered system.
It was now that Pericles and Ephialtes carried their important scheme of judicial reform. The senate of Areopagus was deprived of its discretionary censorial power, as well as of all its judicial competence, except that which related to homicide. The individual magistrates, as well as the senate of Five Hundred, were also stripped of their judicial attributes (except the power of imposing a small fine), which were transferred to the newly created panels of salaried dicasts, lotted off in ten divisions from the aggregate Heliæa. Ephialtes first brought down the laws of Solon from the Acropolis to the neighbourhood of the market-place, where the dicasteries sat—a visible proof that the judicature was now popularised.
In the representation of many authors, the full bearing of this great constitutional change is very inadequately conceived. What we are commonly told is, that Pericles was the first to assign a salary to these numerous dicasteries at Athens. He bribed the people with the public money (says Plutarch), in order to make head against Cimon, who bribed them out of his own private purse; as if the pay were the main feature in the case, and as if all which Pericles did was, to make himself popular by paying the dicasts for judicial service which they had before rendered gratuitously. The truth is, that this numerous army of dicasts, distributed into ten regiments and summoned to act systematically throughout the year, was now for the first time organised: the commencement of their pay is also the commencement of their regular judicial action. What Pericles really did was, to sever for the first time from the administrative competence of the magistrates that judicial authority which had originally gone along with it. The great men who had been accustomed to hold these offices were lowered both in influence and authority: while on the other hand a new life, habit, and sense of power, sprung up among the poorer citizens. A plaintiff having cause of civil action, or an accuser invoking punishment against citizens guilty of injury either to himself or to the state, had still to address himself to one or other of the archons, but it was only with a view of ultimately arriving before the dicastery by whom the cause was to be tried.
While the magistrates individually were thus restricted to simple administration, they experienced still more serious loss of power in their capacity of members of the Areopagus, after the year of archonship was expired. Instead of their previous unmeasured range of supervision and interference, they were now deprived of all judicial sanction beyond that small power of fining which was still left both to individual magistrates, and to the senate of Five Hundred. But the cognisance of homicide was still expressly reserved to them—for the procedure, in this latter case religious not less than judicial, was so thoroughly consecrated by ancient feeling, that no reformer could venture to disturb or remove it.
It was upon this same ground probably that the stationary party defended all the prerogatives of the senate of Areopagus—denouncing the curtailments proposed by Ephialtes as impious and guilty innovations. How extreme their resentment became, when these reforms were carried,—and how fierce was the collision of political parties at this moment,—we may judge by the result. The enemies of Ephialtes caused him to be privately assassinated, by the hand of a Bœotian of Tanagra named Aristodicus. Such a crime—rare in the political annals of Athens, for we come to no known instance of it afterwards until the oligarchy of the Four Hundred in 411 B.C.—marks at once the gravity of the change now introduced, the fierceness of the opposition offered, and the unscrupulous character of the conservative party. Cimon was in exile and had no share in the deed. Doubtless the assassination of Ephialtes produced an effect unfavourable in every way to the party who procured it. The popular party in their resentment must have become still more attached to the judicial reforms just assured to them, while the hands of Pericles, the superior leader left behind and now acting singly, must have been materially strengthened.
It is from this point that the administration of that great man may be said to date: he was now the leading adviser (we might almost say Prime Minister) of the Athenian people. His first years were marked by a series of brilliant successes—already mentioned—the acquisition of Megara as an ally, and the victorious war against Corinth and Ægina. But when he proposed the great and valuable improvement of the Long Walls, thus making one city of Athens and Piræus, the same oligarchical party, which had opposed his judicial changes and assassinated Ephialtes, again stood forward in vehement resistance. Finding direct opposition unavailing, they did not scruple to enter into treasonable correspondence with Sparta—invoking the aid of a foreign force for the overthrow of the democracy: so odious had it become in their eyes, since the recent innovations. How serious was the hazard incurred by Athens, near the time of the battle of Tanagra, has been already recounted; together with the rapid and unexpected reconciliation of parties after that battle, principally owing to the generous patriotism of Cimon and his immediate friends. Cimon was restored from ostracism on this occasion, before his full time had expired; while the rivalry between him and Pericles henceforward becomes mitigated, or even converted into a compromise, whereby the internal affairs of the city were left to the one, and the conduct of foreign expeditions to the other. The successes of Athens during the ensuing ten years were more brilliant than ever, and she attained the maximum of her power: which doubtless had a material effect in imparting stability to the democracy as well as to the administration of Pericles—and enabled both the one and the other to stand the shock of those great public reverses, which deprived the Athenians of their dependent landed alliances, in the interval between the defeat of Coronea and the Thirty Years’ Truce.
Along with the important judicial revolution brought about by Pericles, were introduced other changes belonging to the same scheme and system.
Thus a general power of supervision both over the magistrates and over the public assembly, was vested in seven magistrates, now named for the first time, called nomophylaces, or law-guardians, and doubtless changed every year. These nomophylaces sat alongside of the Proedri or presidents both in the senate and in the public assembly, and were charged with the duty of interposing whenever any step was taken or any proposition made contrary to the existing laws: they were also empowered to constrain the magistrates to act according to law.
Another important change, which we may with probability refer to Pericles, is the institution of the nomothetæ. These men were in point of fact dicasts, members of the six thousand citizens annually sworn in that capacity. But they were not, like the dicasts for trying causes, distributed into panels or regiments known by a particular letter and acting together throughout the entire year: they were lotted off to sit together only on special occasion and as the necessity arose. According to the reform now introduced, the ecclesia or public assembly, even with the sanction of the senate of Five Hundred, became incompetent either to pass a new law or to repeal a law already in existence; it could only enact a psephism—that is, properly speaking, a decree applicable only to a particular case; though the word was used at Athens in a very large sense, sometimes comprehending decrees of general as well as permanent application. In reference to laws, a peculiar judicial procedure was established. The thesmothetæ were directed annually to examine the existing laws, noting any contradictions or double laws on the same matter; and in the first prytany (tenth part) of the Attic year, on the eleventh day, an ecclesia was held, in which the first business was to go through the laws seriatim, and submit them for approval or rejection; first beginning with the laws relating to the senate, next coming to those of more general import, especially such as determined the functions and competence of the magistrates. If any law was condemned by the vote of the public assembly, or if any citizen had a new law to propose, the third assembly of the prytany was employed, previous to any other business, in the appointment of nomothetæ and in the provision of means to pay their salary.
The effect of this institution was to place the making or repealing of laws under the same solemnities and guarantees as the trying of causes or accusations in judicature.
As an additional security both to the public assembly and the nomothetæ against being entrapped into decisions contrary to existing law, another remarkable provision has yet to be mentioned—a provision probably introduced by Pericles at the same time as the formalities of law-making by means of specially delegated nomothetæ. This was the Graphe Paranomon—indictment for informality or illegality—which might be brought on certain grounds against the proposer of any law or any psephism, and rendered him liable to punishment by the dicastery. He was required in bringing forward his new measure to take care that it should not be in contradiction with any pre-existing law—or if there were any such contradiction, to give formal notice of it, to propose the repeal of that which existed, and to write up publicly beforehand what his proposition was—in order that there might never be two contradictory laws at the same time in operation, nor any illegal decree passed either by the senate or by the public assembly. If he neglected this precaution, he was liable to prosecution under the Graphe Paranomon, which any Athenian citizen might bring against him before the dicastery, through the intervention and under the presidency of the thesmothetæ.
That this indictment, as one of the most direct vents for such enmity, was largely applied and abused at Athens, is certain. But though it probably deterred unpractised citizens from originating new propositions, it did not produce the same effect upon those orators who made politics a regular business, and who could therefore both calculate the temper of the people, and reckon upon support from a certain knot of friends. Aristophon, towards the close of his political life, made it a boast that he had been thus indicted and acquitted seventy-five times. Probably the worst effect which it produced was that of encouraging the vein of personality and bitterness which pervades so large a proportion of Attic oratory, even in its most illustrious manifestations; turning deliberative into judicial eloquence, and interweaving the discussion of a law or decree along with a declamatory harangue against the character of its mover. We may at the same time add that the Graphe Paranomon was often the most convenient way of getting a law or a psephism repealed, so that it was used even when the annual period had passed over, and when the mover was therefore out of danger, the indictment being then brought only against the law or decree.
Such were the great constitutional innovations of Pericles and Ephialtes,—changes full of practical results,—the transformation, as well as the complement, of that democratical system which Clisthenes had begun and to which the tide of Athenian feeling had been gradually mounting up during the preceding twenty years. The entire force of these changes is generally not perceived, because the popular dicasteries and the nomothetæ are so often represented as institutions of Solon, and as merely supplied with pay by Pericles. This erroneous supposition prevents all clear view of the growth of the Athenian democracy by throwing back its last elaborations to the period of its early and imperfect start. To strip the magistrates of all their judicial power, except that of imposing a small fine, and the Areopagus of all its jurisdiction except in cases of homicide—providing popular, numerous, and salaried dicasts to decide all the judicial business at Athens as well as to repeal and enact laws—this was the consummation of the Athenian democracy. No serious constitutional alteration (excepting the temporary interruptions of the Four Hundred and the Thirty) was afterwards made until the days of Macedonian interference. As Pericles made it, so it remained in the days of Demosthenes—though with a sensible change in the character, and abatement in the energies, of the people, rich as well as poor.
In appreciating the practical working of these numerous dicasteries at Athens, in comparison with such justice as might have been expected from individual magistrates, we have to consider: first, that personal and pecuniary corruption seems to have been a common vice among the leading men of Athens and Sparta, when acting individually or in boards of a few members, and not uncommon even with the kings of Sparta; next, that in the Grecian cities generally, as we know even from the oligarchical Xenophon (he particularly excepts Sparta), the rich and great men were not only insubordinate to the magistrates, but made a parade of showing that they cared nothing about them. We know also from the same unsuspected source, that while the poorer Athenian citizens who served on shipboard were distinguished for the strictest discipline, the hoplites or middling burghers who formed the infantry were less obedient, and the rich citizens who served on horseback the most disobedient of all.
To make rich criminals amenable to justice has been found so difficult everywhere, until a recent period of history, that we should be surprised if it were otherwise in Greece. When we follow the reckless demeanour of rich men like Critias, Alcibiades, and Midias, even under the full-grown democracy of Athens, we may be sure that their predecessors under the Clisthenean constitution would have been often too formidable to be punished or kept down by an individual archon of ordinary firmness, even assuming him to be upright and well-intentioned. Now the dicasteries established by Pericles were inaccessible both to corruption and intimidation: their number, their secret suffrage, and the impossibility of knowing beforehand what individuals would sit in any particular cause, prevented both the one and the other. And besides that the magnitude of their number, extravagant according to our ideas of judicial business, was essential to this tutelary effect—it served further to render the trial solemn and the verdict imposing on the minds of parties and spectators, as we may see by the fact that, in important causes the dicastery was doubled or tripled. Nor was it possible by any other means than numbers to give dignity to an assembly of citizens, of whom many were poor, some old, and all were despised individually by rich accused persons who were brought before them—as Aristophanes and Xenophon give us plainly to understand. If we except the strict and peculiar educational discipline of Sparta, these numerous dicasteries afforded the only organ which Grecian politics could devise, for getting redress against powerful criminals, public as well as private, and for obtaining a sincere and uncorrupt verdict.
Taking the general working of the dicasteries, we shall find that they are nothing but jury-trial applied on a scale broad, systematic, unaided, and uncontrolled, beyond all other historical experience—and that they therefore exhibit in exaggerated proportions both the excellences and the defects characteristic of the jury system, as compared with decision by trained and professional judges. All the encomiums, which it is customary to pronounce upon jury-trial, will be found predicable of the Athenian dicasteries in a still greater degree; all the reproaches, which can be addressed on good ground to the dicasteries, will apply to modern juries also, though in a less degree.
RHETORS AND SOPHISTS
The first establishment of the dicasteries is nearly coincident with the great improvement of Attic tragedy in passing from Æschylus to Sophocles. The same development of the national genius, now preparing splendid manifestations both in tragic and comic poetry, was called with redoubled force into the path of oratory, by the new judicial system. A certain power of speech now became necessary, not merely for those who intended to take a prominent part in politics, but also for private citizens to vindicate their rights or repel accusations, in a court of justice. It was an accomplishment of the greatest practical utility, even apart from ambitious purposes; hardly less so than the use of arms or the practice of the gymnasium. Accordingly, the teachers of grammar and rhetoric, and the composers of written speeches to be delivered by others, now began to multiply and to acquire an unprecedented importance—as well at Athens as under the contemporary democracy of Syracuse, in which also some form of popular judicature was established. Style and speech began to be reduced to a system, and so communicated; not always happily, for several of the early rhetors adopted an artificial, ornate, and conceited manner, from which Attic good taste afterwards liberated itself. But the very character of a teacher of rhetoric as an art—a man giving precepts and putting himself forward in show-lectures as a model for others, is a feature first belonging to the Periclean age, and indicates a new demand in the minds of the citizens.
We begin to hear, in the generation now growing up, of the rhetor and the sophist, as persons of influence and celebrity. These two names denoted persons of similar moral and intellectual endowments, or often indeed the same person, considered in different points of view; either as professing to improve the moral character, or as communicating power and facility of expression, or as suggesting premises for persuasion, illustrations on the commonplaces of morals and politics, argumentative abundance on matters of ordinary experience, dialectical subtlety in confuting an opponent, etc. Antiphon of the deme Rhamnus in Attica, Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, Tisias of Syracuse, Gorgias of Leontini, Protagoras of Abdera, Prodicus of Ceos, Theodorus of Byzantium, Hippias of Elis, Zeno of Elea, were among the first who distinguished themselves in these departments of teaching. Antiphon was the author of the earliest composed speech really spoken in a dicastery and preserved down to the later critics. These men were mostly not citizens of Athens, though many of them belonged to towns comprehended in the Athenian empire, at a time when important judicial causes belonging to these towns were often carried up to be tried at Athens—while all of them looked to that city as a central point of action and distinction. The term “sophist,” which Herodotus applies with sincere respect to men of distinguished wisdom such as Solon, Anacharsis, Pythagoras, etc., now came to be applied to these teachers of virtue, rhetoric, conversation, and disputation; many of whom professed acquaintance with the whole circle of human science, physical as well as moral (then narrow enough), so far as was necessary to talk about any portion of it plausibly, and to answer any question proposed to them.
Though they passed from one town to another, partly in the capacity of envoys from their fellow-citizens, partly as exhibiting their talents to numerous hearers, with much renown and large gain—they appear to have been viewed with jealousy and dislike by a large portion of the public. For at a time when every citizen pleaded his own cause before the dicastery, they imparted, to those who were rich enough to purchase it, a peculiar skill in the common weapons, which made them like fencing-masters or professional swordsmen amidst a society of untrained duellists. Moreover Socrates—himself a product of the same age, a disputant on the same subjects, and bearing the same name of a sophist—but despising political and judicial practice, and looking to the production of intellectual stimulus and moral impressions upon his hearers—Socrates or rather Plato, speaking through the person of Socrates—carried on throughout his life a constant polemical warfare against the sophists and rhetors in that negative vein in which he was unrivalled. And as the works of these latter have not remained, it is chiefly from the observations of their opponents that we know them; so that they are in a situation such as that in which Socrates himself would have been if we had been compelled to judge of him only from the Clouds of Aristophanes, or from those unfavourable impressions respecting his character which we know, even from the Apologia of Plato and Xenophon, to have been generally prevalent at Athens.
This is not the opportunity, however, for trying to distinguish the good from the evil in the working of the sophists and rhetors. At present it is enough that they were the natural product of the age; supplying those wants, and answering to that stimulus, which arose partly from the deliberations of the ecclesia, but still more from the contentions before the dicastery—in which latter a far greater number of citizens took active part, with or without their own consent. The public and frequent dicasteries constituted by Pericles opened to the Athenian mind precisely that career of improvement which was best suited to its natural aptitude. They were essential to the development of that demand out of which grew not only Grecian oratory, but also, as secondary products, the speculative moral and political philosophy, and the didactic analysis of rhetoric and grammar, which long survived after Grecian creative genius had passed away. And it was one of the first measures of the oligarchy of Thirty, to forbid by an express law, any teaching of the art of speaking. Aristophanes derides the Athenians for their love of talk and controversy, as if it had enfeebled their military energy; but in his time, most undoubtedly, that reproach was not true—nor did it become true, even in part, until the crushing misfortunes which marked the close of the Peloponnesian War. During the course of that war, restless and energetic action was the characteristic of Athens even in a greater degree than oratory or political discussion, though before the time of Demosthenes a material alteration had taken place.
The establishment of these paid dicasteries at Athens was thus one of the most important and prolific events in all Grecian history. The pay helped to furnish a maintenance for old citizens, past the age of military service. Elderly men were the best persons for such a service, and were preferred for judicial purposes both at Sparta and, as it seems, in heroic Greece. Nevertheless, we need not suppose that all the dicasts were either old or poor, though a considerable proportion of them were so, and though Aristophanes selects these qualities as among the most suitable subjects for his ridicule. Pericles has been often censured for this institution, as if he had been the first to insure pay to dicasts who before served for nothing, and had thus introduced poor citizens into courts previously composed of citizens above poverty. But in the first place, this supposition is not correct in point of fact, inasmuch as there were no such constant dicasteries previously acting without pay; next, if it had been true, the habitual exclusion of the poor citizens would have nullified the popular working of these bodies, and would have prevented them from answering any longer to the reigning sentiment at Athens. Nor could it be deemed unreasonable to assign a regular pay to those who thus rendered regular service. It was indeed an essential item in the whole scheme and purpose, so that the suppression of the pay of itself seems to have suspended the dicasteries, while the oligarchy of Four Hundred was established—and it can only be discussed in that light. As the fact stands, we may suppose that the six thousand heliasts who filled the dicasteries were composed of the middling and poorer citizens indiscriminately; though there was nothing to exclude the richer, if they chose to serve.[b]
PHIDIAS ACCUSED
The public works which were undertaken through the advice of Pericles were executed under his inspection; the choice of the artists employed and of the plans adopted, was probably entrusted in a great measure to his judgment; and the large sums expended on them passed through his hands. This was an office which it was scarcely possible to exercise at Athens without either exciting suspicion or giving a handle for calumny. We find that Cratinus in one of his comedies threw out some hints as to the tardiness with which Pericles carried on the third of the Long Walls which he had persuaded the people to begin. “He had been long professing to go on with it, but in fact did not stir a step.” Whether the motives to which this delay was imputed were such as to call his integrity into question, does not appear; but in time his enemies ventured openly to attack him on this ground. Yet the first blow was not aimed directly at himself, but was intended to wound him through the side of a friend. Phidias, whose genius was the ruling principle which animated and controlled every design for the ornament of the city, had been brought, as well by conformity of taste as by the nature of his engagement, into an intimate relation with Pericles. To ruin Phidias was one of the readiest means both of hurting the feelings and of shaking the credit of Pericles. If Phidias could be convicted of a fraud on the public, it would seem an unavoidable inference that Pericles had shared the profit. The ivory statue of the goddess in the Parthenon, which was enriched with massy ornaments of pure gold, appeared to offer a groundwork for a charge which could not easily be refuted. To give it the greater weight, a man named Menon, who had been employed by Phidias in some of the details of the work, was induced to seat himself in the agora with the ensigns of a suppliant, and to implore pardon of the people as the condition of revealing an offence in which he had been an accomplice with Phidias. He accused Phidias of having embezzled a part of the gold which he had received from the treasury. But this charge immediately fell to the ground through a contrivance which Pericles had adopted for a different end. The golden ornaments had been fixed on the statue in such a manner, that they could be taken off without doing it any injury, and thus afforded the means of ascertaining their exact weight. Pericles challenged the accusers of Phidias to use this opportunity of verifying their charge; but they shrank from the application of this decisive test.
Though however they were thus baffled in this part of their attempt, they were not abashed or deterred; for they had discovered another ground, which gave them a surer hold on the public mind. Some keen eye had observed two figures among those with which Phidias had represented the battle between Theseus and the Amazons on the shield of the goddess, in which it detected the portraits of the artist himself, as a bald old man, and that of Pericles in all the comeliness of his graceful person. To the religious feelings of the Athenians this mode of perpetuating the memory of individuals, by connecting their portraits with an object of public worship, appeared to violate the sanctity of the place; and it was probably also viewed as an arrogant intrusion, no less offensive to the majesty of the commonwealth. It seems as if Menon’s evidence was required even to support this charge. Phidias was committed to prison, and died there. The informer, who was a foreigner, was rewarded with certain immunities; and, as one who in the service of the state had provoked a powerful enemy, was placed by a formal decree under the protection of the Ten Generals.
ASPASIA AT THE BAR
This success emboldened the enemies of Pericles to proceed. They had not indeed established any of their accusations; but they had sounded the disposition of the people, and found that it might be inspired with distrust and jealousy of its powerful minister, or that it was not unwilling to see him humbled. They seem now to have concerted a plan for attacking him, both directly and indirectly, in several quarters at once; and they began with a person in whose safety he felt as much concern as in his own, and who could not be ruined without involving him in the like calamity.
This was the celebrated Aspasia, who had long attracted almost as much of the public attention at Athens as Pericles himself. She was a native of Miletus, which was early and long renowned as a school for the cultivation of female graces. She had come, it would seem, as an adventurer to Athens, and by the combined charms of her person, manners, and conversation, won the affections and the esteem of Pericles. Her station had freed her from the restraints which custom laid on the education of the Athenian matron: and she had enriched her mind with accomplishments which were rare even among the men. Her acquaintance with Pericles seems to have begun while he was still united to a lady of high birth, before the wife of the wealthy Hipponicus. We can hardly doubt that it was Aspasia who first disturbed this union, though it is said to have been dissolved by mutual consent. But after parting from his wife, who had borne him two sons, Pericles attached himself to Aspasia by the most intimate relation which the laws permitted him to contract with a foreign woman; and she acquired an ascendency over him, which soon became notorious, and furnished the comic poets with an inexhaustible fund of ridicule, and his enemies with a ground for serious charges. On the stage she was the Hera of the Athenian Zeus, the Omphale, or the Dejanira of an enslaved or a faithless Hercules. The Samian War was ascribed to her interposition on behalf of her birthplace; and rumours were set afloat which represented her as ministering to the vices of Pericles by the most odious and degrading of offices. There was perhaps as little foundation for this report, as for a similar one in which Phidias was implicated; though among all the imputations brought against Pericles this is that which it is the most difficult clearly to refute.
But we are inclined to believe that it may have arisen from the peculiar nature of Aspasia’s private circles, which, with a bold neglect of established usage, were composed not only of the most intelligent and accomplished men to be found at Athens, but also of matrons, who it is said were brought by their husbands, to listen to her conversation; which must have been highly instructive as well as brilliant, since Plato did not hesitate to describe her as the preceptress of Socrates, and to assert that she both formed the rhetoric of Pericles, and composed one of his most admired harangues. The innovation which drew women of free birth, and good condition, into her company for such a purpose, must, even where the truth was understood, have surprised and offended many; and it was liable to the grossest misconstruction. And if her female friends were sometimes seen watching the progress of the works of Phidias, it was easy, through his intimacy with Pericles, to connect this fact with a calumny of the same kind.
There was another rumour still more dangerous, which grew out of the character of the persons who were admitted to the society of Pericles and Aspasia. Athens had become a place of resort for learned and ingenious men of all pursuits. None were more welcome at the house of Pericles than such as were distinguished by philosophical studies, and especially by the profession of new speculative tenets. He himself was never weary of discussing such subjects; and Aspasia was undoubtedly able to bear her part in this, as well as in any other kind of conversation. The mere presence of Anaxagoras, Zeno, Protagoras, and other celebrated men, who were known to hold doctrines very remote from the religious conceptions of the vulgar, was sufficient to make a circle in which they were familiar pass for a school of impiety. Such were the materials out of which the comic poet Hermippus, laying aside the mask, framed a criminal prosecution against Aspasia. His indictment included two heads: an offence against religion, and that of corrupting Athenian women to gratify the passions of Pericles.
ANAXAGORAS ALSO ASSAILED
This cause seems to have been still pending, when one Diopithes procured a decree, by which persons who denied the being of the gods, or taught doctrines concerning the celestial bodies which were inconsistent with religion, were made liable to a certain criminal process. This stroke was aimed immediately at Anaxagoras—whose physical speculations had become famous, and were thought to rob the greatest of the heavenly beings of their inherent deity—but indirectly at his disciple and patron Pericles. When the discussion of this decree, and the prosecution commenced against Aspasia, had disposed the people to listen to other less probable charges, the main attack was opened, and the accusation which in the affair of Phidias had been silenced by the force of truth, was revived in another form. A decree was passed on the motion of one Dracontides, directing Pericles to give in his accounts to the Prytanis, to be submitted to a trial, which was to be conducted with extraordinary solemnity; for it was to be held in the citadel, and the jurors were to take the balls with which each signified his verdict, from the top of an altar. But this part of the decree was afterwards modified by an amendment moved by Agnon, which ordered the cause to be tried in the ordinary way, but by a body of fifteen hundred jurors. The uncertainty of the party which managed these proceedings, and their distrust as to the evidence which they should be able to procure, seem to be strongly marked by a clause in this decree, which provided that the offence imputed to Pericles might be described either as embezzlement, or by a more general name, as coming under the head of public wrong.
Yet all these machinations failed at least of reaching their main object. The issue of those which were directed against Anaxagoras cannot be exactly ascertained through the discrepancy of the accounts given of it. According to some authors he was tried, and condemned either to a fine and banishment or to death; but in the latter case made his escape from prison. According to others he was defended by Pericles, and acquitted. Plutarch says that Pericles, fearing the event of a trial, induced him to withdraw from Athens; and it seems to have been admitted on all hands, that he ended his long life in quiet and honour at Lampsacus. The danger which threatened Aspasia was also averted; but it seems that Pericles, who pleaded her cause, found need for his most strenuous exertions, and that in her behalf he descended to tears and entreaties, which no similar emergency of his own could ever draw from him. It was indeed probably a trial more of his personal influence than of his eloquence; and his success, hardly as it was won, may have induced his adversaries to drop the proceedings instituted against himself, or at least to postpone them to a fitter season. After weathering this storm he seems to have recovered his former high and firm position, which to the end of his life was never again endangered, except by one very transient gust of popular displeasure. He felt strong enough to resist the wishes, and to rebuke the impatience of the people. Yet it was a persuasion so widely spread among the ancients as to have lasted even to modern times, that his dread of the persecution which hung over him, and his consciousness that his expenditure of the public money would not bear a scrutiny, were at least among the motives which induced him to kindle the war which put an end to the Thirty Years’ Truce.[c]
Greek Terra-cotta Heads
(In the British Museum)
Greek Coins